The Weed That Strings the Hangman’s Bag by Alan BradleyDelacorte Press, 2010

The Weed That Strings the Hangman’s Bag picks up a little more than a month after The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie leaves off, so it was good to read them consecutively. It’s summer in Bishop’s Lacey, the little village outside of which eleven-year-old Flavia de Luce lives with her father and two older sisters in the old family manor, Buckshaw. Flavia’s relaxing in the churchyard when she sees that she has company: it turns out that the van of a famous puppeteer, Rupert Porson, has broken down, and he and his assistant are stranded. The vicar convinces them to put on a show while they wait for the mechanic to fix the van, and Flavia’s roped into helping them set up and settle in: they’ve been given permission to camp in the field of a neighboring farm. The farm belongs to a couple whose young son was found hanged in the woods five years earlier, and they’ve become reclusive since then: Flavia has a more-than-a-little creepy encounter with the woman of the house, which makes you wonder what other creepiness has happened on/near this farm, and what other creepiness is still in store.

As with the last Flavia de Luce mystery, in this one the stranger who arrives in town dies soon after—and turns out not to be a stranger at all. And once again, Flavia has a role in unraveling how the “stranger” is connected to Bishop’s Lacey, and why he’s ended up dead.

I am (still) fond of Flavia and her boldness and cleverness; passages like the below crack me up:

“You are unreliable, Flavia,” he said. “Utterly unreliable.”
Of course I was! It was one of the things I loved most about myself.
Eleven-year-olds are supposed to be unreliable. We’re past the age of being poppets: the age where people bend over and poke us in the tum with their fingers and make idiotic noises that sound like “boof-boof”—just the thought of which is enough to make me bring up my Bovril. And yet we’re still not at the age where anyone ever mistakes us for a grown-up. The fact is, we’re invisible—except when we choose not to be. (p 112)

I like the little world of Bishop’s Lacey, and I feel like Bradley’s writing is better in this book than the last one—or maybe I was just paying better attention—I really enjoyed the descriptions of, say, the cool damp forest and all its plant life, or the wonder of looking down from above at a well-constructed puppet theater, the magic of it. And, like with The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie, I like the conventions of the mystery, the way different characters, many with a motive, are introduced, and the way you stay guessing. I read this book over the course of a few days when I was sick with a nasty cold, and it felt like perfect curled-up-with-a-blanket reading.